


_The Dark End of the Street

by glenarvon



Series: _Brilliancy [26]
Category: Watch Dogs (Video Game)
Genre: Disturbing Themes, Gen, Reader Discretion Adviced
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-31
Updated: 2016-03-31
Packaged: 2018-05-30 09:49:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6419020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glenarvon/pseuds/glenarvon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The vigilante pays his dues.</p>
            </blockquote>





	_The Dark End of the Street

 [takes place in 2018, soon after femme fatale]

* * *

The conventions of urban legends dictates the video should be grainy, full of blurry pixels and the sound should be off just a fraction, but it’s not. The video spares no details, draws the room and the two men in sharp relief. It reveals it’s location through the view through the windows of Marina City, for later, when the police storms the place.

The chair in the centre of the frame is bolted to the floor, a polished steel piece of furnishing, intentionally solid and unmoving even before the man is pushed down into it and strapped tightly into place by simple zip-ties on hands and feet. The plastic straps bite deep into him, through the fabric of his expensive suit and it brings him out of the daze he’s in. He pulls his head up and his eyes are bloodshot and take a long moment to focus on the other man.

In Chicago in 2018, everyone will recognise the vigilante. He is an urban legend in his own right, a boogyman and a saviour, depending on where you stand and where you look and it’d be smart to assume he’s aware of this. He wears what can, at this point, be best described as, his full regalia. The battered leather coat has seen better days, the hems are frayed and the leather discoloured in many places. Scraped away on rough asphalt, burned and splattered in blood and a few patched bullet holes here and there.

As the vigilante straightens away from the bound man, his masked face passes across the screen, allowing a brief glimpse of the fine lines around his eyes and their brilliant green, the deeper shadows where his brows are drawn together into a deep frown.

His movement is crisply smooth as he steps out of frame. A moment later, the picture shifts a little as he adjust the camera.

The man in the chair chuckles quietly to himself, gaze fixed on the vigilante and says, "Seriously? What are you doing?"

He gets no answer, but the vigilante returns, walks behind him and slides a hand through his hair, long fingers encased in fine black gloves in harsh contrast to the man’s pallid face. The vigilante’s grip tightens and he tilts the man’s head back, angles it straight at the camera, an invitation to run Profiler on his face.

[Vincent Fisher] Profiler will say, even in its vanilla version, and offer a link to Fisher homepage, where he advertises as a freelance business manager and consultant.

Fisher's neck muscles strain in the vigilante's grip as he turns his head a little to catch a look of him.

"What will she say?" he asks, careless of the invisible audience or perhaps just because of it. "What will she think about you?"

The vigilante drops his hand down, covers Fisher's mouth with his hand and pulls his head back, exposes his throat and the vigilante leans down by his side. He pulls the mask from his face. The last good picture of him is years out of date so this cannot be an accident, not when he's the one who put the camera there and fixed its eye on himself. His features are harsh, less handsome and more ordinary than infamy would have it. His voice is pitched low, barely audible without audio enhancement.

"Do you know what happens if you keep talking?" he asks without much inflection other than an uncompromising rasp.

He takes his hand away, though and Fisher turns his head a little further, makes eye contact and despite his precarious position, Fisher doesn't seem daunted. He bares his teeth in a mocking grin.

"Oh yes," he says and its sincere enough. "You'll hurt me worse and then you'll kill me." His gaze darts away from the vigilante for a moment, pauses on the camera as if he has to make sure attention is on him, as if there's a chance its not. He drops his gaze back to the vigilante.

"I know you," Fisher adds. "But that's not the point. I know _what_ you are, too."

The vigilante's expression remains the same, pretending to dismiss Fisher's insinuation and he doesn't ask, doesn't give Fisher the prompts he's looking for.

"Some people like the chase," Fisher continues anyway. He relaxes his pose and neck, faces away from the vigilante. "And you do, I'm sure you do, but I think you like the kill more. Or… no," he says, puts his head from side to side as if he's putting it together even as he speaks.

The vigilante steps in close behind him, a looming shadow now, the frame cuts off the top of his head. He has become his own archetype, the high collar and the slight downward slope of his shoulders, his strength made manifest in the tight control of his movement.

"No," Fisher continues, oblivious to the vigilante's actions or uncaring of them. He's secured in the chair and he knows he's not going anywhere unless the vigilante lets him.

"It's all of it, isn't it? The hunt and the kill, but between them, you get off on the struggle." He pauses for a moment, considering, watches the camera and seems to look _through,_ to whoever happens to be on the other side of the video. "And making people _watch…_ you are a very sick person." He chuckles to himself. "I won't judge, I made good money off of people like you, but I don't know about your audience…"

There a people out there in the world who would try to turn the hunter into prey, who will dissect this film with a mad surgeon's meticulousness. There are algorithms designed by masterminds to see through the deceiving lies every man and woman tells themselves to get through their day. There is no privacy of the mind, no secret depth of the soul, but the vigilante is an outlier and the models don't work so well on outliers.

He let's Fisher talk because he can, because there's nothing here that'd threaten him, and because he's given Fisher a warning and, freely, Fisher has chosen to disregard that warning.

The vigilante brings a zip-tie down around Fisher's throat and pulls it tight. At first, it merely rest against Fisher's vulnerable skin. It shuts Fisher's up and he struggles to hold on to his casual mien in the face of what's about to happen. He opens his mouth, though, for a last, penetrating quip, but this time, the vigilante doesn't let him have it and the zip-tie cuts into Fisher's flesh and the only sound he manages to make is a quiet wheezing.

It turns out very quickly, that the zip-tie isn't tight enough to kill, it's not even tight enough to cause unconsciousness, but it rips Fisher's self-control away from him, body lurching in desperate reflex, pulling and tearing on the bounds in a futile attempt to get away.

The vigilante leans forward again, on the other side of Fisher's face than before and says, "Don't worry about scarring." His tone has barely shifted, but he doesn't hide some dark amusement at the private joke, not meant to be understood by the audience and far beyond Fisher's dimming awareness.

The vigilante steps away after that, leaves the frame and the strangling man and with the motion, there's no distraction left for a viewer, for the friend of a friend, who happened to be online on the day the video appeared online out of nowhere. It's nothing like CG, not as smooth and spectacular, it does not bow to even the most fleeting aestheticism. Blood flow stunted and panic alone make Fisher's otherwise appealing face bloat and discolour, patches of blue and red and bulging eyes. He shakes, as violently as the bondage will allow, so close to the breaking point and each passing second promises _this is it, this is it, this is it_ and it never is. It doesn't stop and although, in reality, it is only minutes, it feels like forever just watching and how long it feels for Fisher is beyond all normal human comprehension.

Eventually, Fisher's body does go limp and the vigilante steps into frame again. His expression is carved from stone and ice, unmoved and unmoving, calm concentration as he loosens the zip-tie. He brings Fisher back with a slap on the cheek, perversely gentle in contrast to the display of his cruelty.

Fisher's gaze is unfocussed and wary now, he either cannot speak or does not dare, sags heavily in the steel chair. With his back to the camera, the vigilante only stands for a long minutes and Fisher's rattling breath quiets. The vigilante waits until Fisher's has started to collect himself before he pulls the zip-tie tight again.

The vigilante remains in the picture this time. Walks past Fisher and settles against the edge of a desk and watches as Fisher's struggles gradually lose their strength and even the vestiges of coordination they had had at the beginning. The movement deteriorates into spasms and tremors and Fisher's head lolls back even when he's allowed to breathe. The vigilante lets it go on for longer than is comfortable, until the fine suit is drenched in sweat and blood begins to seep through the fabric on Fisher's arms, chafed raw in his senseless fight to free himself.

It goes on until whatever depraved fascination has prompted the viewers to watch has faded and all that's left is the stirring of some primal revulsion, coming from a depth far beyond mere nausea.

For a moment the vigilante blocks the view and it's possible to imagine a moment of clarity in Fisher as their gaze connects, or perhaps it is mere fantasy and it is the greater mercy to think that Fisher's consciousness has already fled.

The vigilante grips the zip-tie and pulls, more force this time and the zip-ties is lost in the flesh. It looks obscene, but it doesn't last long, because this time the vigilante means to kill. Fisher shudders and twitches and goes still, his eyes wide but disturbingly empty.

The vigilante allows the audience a last glimpse of his face, lets them see how frighteningly little he has been affected by what he's just done. In turning away, he pulls the mask up just as he leaves the frame.

The camera keeps running for long minutes after he's gone, rests intimately on the dead man before it finally, not in pity but from necessity, cuts to black.

* * *

The vigilante catches sight of himself in the mirror in the elevator as he leaves. There is no sign in his face of what he's just done. He stops briefly as he steps out in the street, uses his phone to survey his surrounding, but the city hasn't changed because of the dead several stories above him. The crowd flows with and around him as he walks to his car. He draws a few stares, but he's used to them by now and they pass without incident. Most people will dismiss the moment, will think they are mistaken or that their own imagination played tricks on them. He's seen it in the texts to their friends later, only a few have the presence of mind to recognise him and reach a decision. It's been a slow change in the public awareness about him. He's better known these days and like any celebrity, people don't believe they'll ever come across him. 

He reaches his car and gets in and ignores the way his gloves cling a little damply to his palms as he puts his hand on the wheel. He ignores the way his fingers tremble and tension runs the length of his body, slices over his skull and down his neck. He ignores the numbness in his stomach and the lump in his throat that takes some effort to swallow down. The blood doesn't pulse low in his groin for two or so heartbeats too long and the street slips sharply into focus, the world slowing down unbidden.

Nothing's changed today, he tells himself.

The conventions of urban legends dictates the film must be hard to find, must be handed down through layer upon layer of friends and distant acquaintances. He can upload to all relevant platforms, but it won't stay there for long, it'll be taken down by law enforcement and website owners, but no one believes they can shove the ghost back into the bottle. They know who he is, his enemies, and now they have a new piece of knowledge about what he can do them.

The conventions of urban legends dictates there must be more to the video than meets the eye. Embedded in the video is the link to a cloud storage account, filled with case files and other videos, all of them detailing Vincent Fisher's true crimes, all the ones he's never been convicted of in the years he spent working for the Chicago South Club and for himself. There are videos, some fragments, some at their full length and the symmetry falls into place, seeing the girls struggle in Fisher's arms with piano wire around their throats and sheer animal panic in their eyes.

Any lingering doubts about whether Fisher was a victim today will be purged in the face of the collected evidence against him. No attorney will have to nod it through, no judge will have to weigh it against some constitutional right and no criminal defence lawyer will tear it to pieces.

Fisher deserved much worse than some thirty minutes of _discomfort_ before his death, the vigilante thinks to himself, reviewing the compiled data before he hits the upload button. 

**Author's Note:**

> **Reference:**   
>  _"Look… everyone needs to take a walk to the dark end of the street sometimes, it's what we are." Strange Days_
> 
> * * *
> 
> **Author's Note:** In Dark Clouds, Aiden displays this disturbing tendency to play with his prey and even now, I'm not entirely sure what to make of it. Aiden's is a complex personality, but his traits, even the contradictory ones, when put in the right place and context, form a compelling whole. This sadism, though? I don't know where it belongs in the jigsaw. This story is my attempt to make it fit _somehow_. Let me know how I'm doing.


End file.
